Description

Typewar is a popular font-guessing game built with Django and Pinax.
This talk will cover everything from game mechanics and statistics to
development of an API for an iPhone client and from how we promoted and
launched the site to the performance challenges we faced.

Abstract

Typewar was developed as a side project at Eldarion and went from
concept to launch in a matter of weeks. The first day saw 5,000 visitors
and since then, over 50,000 people have attempted to "guess the
typeface" more than 5 million times.

The talk will cover:

how we went from concept to design mockup to prototype

game mechanics such as:

points

levels

badges

streaks

leader boards

stats (with lots of bayesian goodness)

generation of glyphs with PIL

mitigation against cheaters

twitter integration

migrating unauthenticated user data over on sign up / log in

activity streams

performance challenges

database optimizations

queuing of asynchronous tasks

development of an API for use in an iPhone client

deployment

how we promoted and launched the site

We will also discuss various open source Django apps that have been
extracted from the project and used on subsequent sites by us and
others.